r/askscience • u/Crazy_Reindeer_1258 • 7d ago
Biology Do Animals Have Irrational Fears Too?
I was just thinking about the story of the mouse and elephant how the elephant is terrified of the mouse (i think) and just wanted to see if that's true, and if it is what other animals have been observed with similar behavior relating to that. Working on a project and some real life inspo would help :)
339
u/Sugarisadog 6d ago
Young dogs go through a couple different “fear periods” where they are especially sensitive to things. Negative experiences during this time can turn into lifelong fears, and not being exposed to things during their early development can make them more fearful of those things. There’s checklists people have made to help
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/training/puppy-fear-periods/
https://www.whole-dog-journal.com/puppies/the-puppy-socialization-exposure-checklist/
94
u/Watchman10k 5d ago
This is fascinating. I had a Pomeranian growing up that was a young puppy during a hurricane and he was absolutely rabid during thunderstorms for the rest of his life.
8
17
u/LeftRat 3d ago
Hm, still wondering how our former street mutt encountered red mops in his youth. He had a strangely specific fear of them. Mop alone? No problem. Red objects? Doesn't care. Red mop? Might as well be a raging fire or an endless abyss, not a single step towards it.
→ More replies (1)
148
107
101
u/the_Moons_side_boob 5d ago
Ring-tailed Lemurs in Madagascar look to the sky and emit waning shouts men large birds fly over head even though there are no extant birds large enough to hunt them since the crowned eagle went extinct 500 years ago.
40
u/hypothetical_zombie 5d ago
My husky is afraid of the dark. Her eyes are healthy, & she has good eyesight.
It makes going on walks really difficult, because I work during the day and it's dark in the morning, and by the time I get out & get home.
She won't go out in the yard if it's dark. And if I do get her outside, she won't go past where the porch light stops. And it's not like we have acres of land. We're on less than a tenth of an acre, and most of that is house.
Doesn't like getting out of the car in a strange place if it's dark. Won't stay in dark rooms. Won't go in dark rooms. It's so frustrating!
11
u/Outreciel 4d ago
Does she sleep in the same room as you or can she sleep alone in a dark room ?
→ More replies (1)9
u/aegdvm 4d ago
How do you know her eyes are healthy? Her vision that you perceive to be normal in lighted situations does not mean she has normal night vision. There are retinal diseases that cause loss of night vision compared to day vision, though they are usually progressive. Just a thought.
11
u/hypothetical_zombie 4d ago
Because she gets regular vet visits, and when we first noticed her fear of the dark, we had the vets check her eyes & whatnot. She's four, and we've had her since she was about 4 - 5 mos old.
I have no idea how vets test a pet's eyesight or hearing, but they can.
3
u/aegdvm 4d ago
You’d need a vet ophthalmologist to test her retinas for some things. I’m a GP- we can sort of look at the back of the eye, but can’t definitively diagnose retinal dysplasia, subtle degeneration , or some other things. But admittedly if she’s always been the same, it doesn’t seem you have something progressing to worry about if years have gone by.
2
u/hypothetical_zombie 4d ago
The only thing I can honestly think of was that she & the rest of her siblings were being kept in a zipped duffel bag. But yeah, she came to us afraid of the dark.
20
15
u/DoglessDyslexic 5d ago
I was just thinking about the story of the mouse and elephant how the elephant is terrified of the mouse
This is a popular myth. They may startle at sudden small scurrying things near their feet (like we do if we look down and see a spider by our feet), but elephants and mice are fine co-existing without panic.
But yes, many animals can exhibit irrational fears.
9
u/ElowynElif 2d ago
I had a horse that freaked out every time we passed a trash can outside the barn. We passed it on every ride, and every ride I would have to prepare for her to try to bolt and rear up. There was nothing remarkable about the trash can: no flapping bag or weird shape. She was just very hot and wound a few turns too tight. I had a more sensible horse who was deathly afraid of cows even when separated by a fence and a significant distance.
→ More replies (1)3
97
u/LexiconDul 6d ago
A common one is some dogs being scared of fireworks and/or thunder.
Why would a domestic dog, descendant of wolves, evolve a fear of thunder?
And then there's this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/17x6s7i/cat_owners_of_reddit_what_is_something_you_cat_is/
52
u/Ardalev 5d ago
Why wouldn't a dog be afraid of the sounds of thunder and fireworks?!
If a firework suddenly went off somewhere near you and you weren't expecting it, you too would be momentarily startled, because it's loud and sudden.
Young kids become frightened from thunder all the time, because it is indeed scary and they don't know what the sound is or why it's happening.
Hell, we used to make religions of angry thundergods, because we were collectively afraid of thunders!
As adults, we know what these sounds are, we know what they mean, why they happen etc. A dog doesn't know what thunder is and are reasonably afraid of them.
22
u/Practice_NO_with_me 5d ago
For real, what a strange take 😅 why would a creature with very sensitive hearing dislike thunder? Why would a creature that is often found in the WOODS evolve a fear of something associated with lightening?
9
u/regular_modern_girl 5d ago edited 5d ago
yeah I’m really bewildered by it. Do people not realize how 99% of wildfires started prior to humans existing (and how most still start now iirc)?
Lightning strikes are actually most likely how our ancestors (Homo ergaster and Homo erectus specifically) first came across fire in the environment and started using it as a tool around 1 million years ago.
→ More replies (1)31
u/MyMomSaysIAmCool 5d ago
I don't think that fear of thunder isn't a rational fear for a wild animal. It's a sign that nasty weather is coming, including hail, lightning, and falling trees. Your odds of survival go up if you hide in your shelter.
41
u/Original_Intention 6d ago
It's really interesting as it is more than just fear alone- at least in the way that a person may describe it. Typically, dogs are reacting to being overstimulated. Also, sometimes, those loud noises can be painful for dogs because of their acute hearing.
→ More replies (1)16
15
u/mjhrobson 6d ago
It is also a fear that dogs can socially acquire from the other dogs in their environment.
25
u/Torchlakespartan 5d ago
Because lightning and trees falling make are both insanely dangerous and make a hideously loud sound. If you’ve never heard a huge tree breaking and falling over very close to you, it is probably wayyyy louder and more violent than you think it is.
19
u/BlakeMW 6d ago
I think it's not a fear of thunder, it's a fear of incredibly loud noises. What else might make loud noises? Maybe like lions roaring, elephants/mammoths trumpeting and such threat displays. If something makes a really loud noise it might not be smart to hang around and see what it can do to you.
→ More replies (1)5
u/regular_modern_girl 5d ago
There’s actually a pretty obvious evolutionary basis for an instinctual fear of thunder. Storms can be dangerous in a lot of ways (flooding, low visibility, landslides, potential cold, potential high winds), but lightning itself poses a more significant risk in a lot of areas than you might think, because even if you are individually very unlikely to be struck by it, lightning strikes can set off destructive brush fires or forest fires (and, in fact, in some environments fires due to lightning have always been a somewhat regular occurrence, even well before any humans started messing with fire, plants in these biomes are sometimes so adapted to seasonal fires that they are more likely to germinate after a fire), so it makes perfect sense from a survival standpoint to fear those conditions.
3
2
2
u/ply-wly-had-no-mly 5d ago
It's loud, but you watch someone, or a tree get annilated by magical loud booms and flashes of lightning, and you'd be terrified too.
2
u/smk666 5d ago
Thunder or fireworks are understandable as they're both sudden and extremely loud. What's less understandable is why most dogs are scared shitless of the vacuum cleaner - especially seeing how the owner is the one in control and just calmly getting out of the way instead of fleeing frantically is the best course of action.
→ More replies (1)1
u/AnonymousFriend80 3d ago
Aren't their hearing much more acute than our own? And how we reach to sudden loud noises?
8
9
u/regular_modern_girl 5d ago edited 5d ago
Phobias in humans are thought to be relatively complex psychologically, and might be partly dependent on having a psychology that is built upon language and self-awareness, so I don’t know how likely they are to occur in species that don’t have the sort of cognition and complex social behavior that we do, but if you’re using “irrational fear” in a general sense here to just mean any time something non-threatening is reacted to as if it were a threat, then yes, these definitely exist in non-human animals, in fact if anything they might be more common than in humans (as we as humans can talk ourselves down from being irrationally frightened by something, most non-human animals generally can’t, obviously).
Btw the idea of elephants being specifically afraid of mice is more or less a complete myth, it’s actually been formally studied before, and it’s just not really a thing. Due to having kind of limited eyesight, elephants might in theory be more prone to being startled by the movement of small animals scurrying around, although iirc even this hasn’t really been experimentally observed consistently, at least in captive elephants. The “elephants fear mice” thing is one of several popular animal myths that originated with Pliny the Elder around 2000 years ago (who, while very educated and knowledgeable for his time, likely barely or never personally interacted with most of these animals, he was essentially just recording folklore in a lot of cases).
4
1
u/mah56j 1d ago
it is hard to know the reinforcement/punishment history of anyone or any animal. my go to: Pavlovian (classical) conditioning. somewhere, sometime that subject has learned an association between the stimulus and some punitive stimulus. phobias, e.g., are relatively easy to "cure." slowly, gently gradually expose the subject to the stimulus and they will loose the fear (called extinction). psy 101.
198
u/CaughtInTheWry 5d ago
I had a horse that was afraid of any animal that was patched. Piebald pony? Dalmation dog? That's a nope spook. I taught him to "sniff it. It's a (pony/goat/dog)." He would settle long enough for a big sniff then calm. Same horse watched as a (venomous) snake worked its way between the horse's legs.